Opera on 3

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Migrated podcast image for: Radio 3 Opera Guides

Music: Classical: Opera

Programme presenting rare and fascinating operatic performances

Programme presenting rare and fascinating performances and vividly communicating the immediacy of the live experience

Opera on 3: Verdi’s Rigoletto

Verdi’s Rigoletto

BBC Radio 3 - Opera on 3, Verdi’s Rigoletto

From the New York Met: Luca Salsi stars in Verdi's great tragedy Rigoletto.

From the New York Met: Luca Salsi stars as Verdi's hunchbacked jester Rigoletto, whose implacable quest for vengeance brings only personal tragedy to himself and his daughter.

From the New York Met: Luca Salsi stars as the hunchbacked jester whose implacable quest for vengeance brings only personal tragedy to himself and to his daughter.

Presented by Debra Lew Harder with commentator Ira Siff.

Rigoletto is the Duke of Mantua's hunchbacked jester who revels in mocking and humiliating the courtiers by encouraging the Duke to have his way with their wives and daughters.  But in the end it is his own daughter Gilda who is raped by the Duke, and in his quest for vengeance it is Rigoletto himself who unwittingly commissions her murder.

Verdi's compelling masterpiece of ineluctable fate and the futility of retribution is full of profound psychological insights and some of his greatest music including the Duke of Mantua's jaunty, ever-popular aria 'La donna è mobile' which, as he sings of the inconstancy of women, is a grotesque moment of blackly humorous dramatic irony.

Rigoletto ..... Luca Salsi (baritone) 
Gilda ..... Lisette Oropesa (soprano) 
Duke of Mantua ..... Stephen Costello (tenor)  
Sparafucile ..... John Relyea (bass)
Maddalena ..... Aigul Akhmetshina (contralto)
Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra
Conductor Speranza Scappucci

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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